Gorillaz, Monkees, K/DA, and OFK: Creating Virtual Identity

[Music] thank you I am Teddy diff sometimes Tenerife is the director co-writer and lead singer of the ofk project co-designer of hyper light Drifter co-founder of La Indie Games Collective glitch City and someone on Twitter who you may follow or have muted sometimes I am my legal name they live in LA they lease a car they need to cancel their Disney Plus subscription they try very hard to get a good table when seated at restaurants because their grandmother taught them it was important for being a good host when dining out but with my close friends I'm just me whoever that is and I'm all those other things unfiltered I'm going to do my best this morning to speak to you without filter this talk is all about Persona filters you might know them better as virtual identities vtubers virtual bands or

gorillas um let's step back for a second hi I'm up here because I run the ofk project and for those of you who are not familiar I will now pitch our video game because that is my job we are ofk is a virtual band with an interactive TV series that tells their origin story it's a heartfelt vulnerable portrayal of what it costs to make art and what thrives for it the virtual band are kind of like gorillas or KDA but ofk's Band characters are Indie not pop stars just trying to make it happen like other artists let's watch the trailer [Music] I miss my life Carter

[Music] I take a piece of me that hurts I throw it away [Music] [Music] who's to say what will last I thought you had Integrity I'm so jealous man to be able to just do the thing you want to be doing [Music] foreign

[Applause] yeah five years there it is uh here they are this is the band clockwise producer Jay Zang keyboardist itsumi Saito vocalist Luca lafay visual artist Carter Flores and hologram audio plug-in debug the cat uh ofk are based in Los Angeles where they played their first show on stage at the game awards in 2020. we released our game and EP last fall on switch PlayStation PC we released a holiday song and music video in December and just last month we played our first Fully live show in LA I play Luca lefe in the game and in our music I act as him in the game I sing as him in our music basically I'm speaking on this topic today because I've been leading a team that's building and operating virtual identities now for five years I'm going to try to impart what I've learned about virtual identities their history how they're created how they live and die if there's a character you're considering bringing into virtual existence consider how they

resonate with you what from my experience you'd emulate what you'd do differently what excites you and what scares you bring that to the Q a at the end please part one a brief history of virtual identity let's go so you are already familiar with a lot of virtual identities probably more than you realize you probably know gorillas which is gorillas not the gorillas which My Life um a lot of people mistakenly think of them as the first virtual band they were created in 1998 by artist Jamie Hewlett known for his comic Tank Girl and Rockstar Damon Albarn who had risen to fame with his band blur Gorillaz released their first album in 2001 with a series of animated music videos that introduced the virtual band I find gorilla is really interesting because at first for live shows they hid themselves behind a screen and then animated video projections of the characters played in front they did this even though their creators were already famous and obviously not a secret um but as the years went on they've transitioned to letting the musicians be

out in front as themselves less committed to the illusion during live shows that flexible relationship between artists and virtual identity fascinates me and I'll explain why in this talk you probably also know KDA uh created by riot games in 2018 and composed of four characters from their game League of Legends reskinned as a pop group from a business perspective KDA was created to get Riot more involved in music to promote league and to sell League skins but of course the band has a huge fan base of its own uh they're a notable contrast to gorillas in that the performers do not own the virtual identities that they perform as kind of as a result of that to date at least on U.S streaming platforms KDA have released just six songs um but if you're interested in creating virtual identity there are so many points of reference Beyond these big current ones the more you think of virtual identity as the broad and unexplored space it is the Richer of a history you'll find to set the stage I would describe virtual identity as this a fictional

character presented as if they exist in our reality operated by a person or persons who have their own separate identities here are some of my favorites so this is a starter pack of the lineage of virtual celebrity across television music and the internet Alvin and the Chipmunks 1958 yeah right uh a trio of animated Chipmunks first created for a children's song in which the Creator Ross bhagdasarian pitch shifted his voice to sound like tiny cute Chipmunks they actually started with just a song and then the following year they got a comic which was then developed into a TV series that ran for one season and was canceled then their original Creator and voice died but the Chipmunks did not they were resurrected in the early 80s for a new TV series which is probably the one that you know if you know them that ran for eight seasons so today they are zombie Chipmunks with a dead Creator and they have five Grammys in 1966 the monkeys which by the way has got to be a reference to or gorillas has

to be a reference to the monkeys and I would love to ask them um this one is really weird and in my personal it's my personal favorite point of reference for ofk the monkeys were a band created in conjunction with a TV show much like ofk they were developed by an aspiring filmmaker Bob raffleson who pitched the music and the series to Columbia Records and their TV division respectively musically they were meant to be kind of America's answer to the Beatles and in a way they they were they were very very popular um they only lasted a few years as a group but um they did well for themselves they are of course they're not animated characters and the band members go by their real names but the monkeys started as fictional they were assembled by a casting call for actors and musicians everything that they said and sang on TV was written for them and fiction but they seem to exist in the real world and in fact the Monkeys released albums and played concerts like any other band what's really fascinating about this one is that at first the band members were so busy filming the TV show and doing

press and stuff that they were kept out of the music and writing and recording process um there was a lot of interesting public backlash and power struggle because of that and the monkeys eventually took control of their own music narrowing the gap between their ritual identities and the real ones what makes this especially interesting to me is that most of their peers at the time including the Beatles used session musicians for recordings so the line of how one-to-one any musician is to their band identity is already blurry 1994 Space Ghost another virtual identity Cartoon Network transformed Space Ghost a superhero from a 1966 cartoon into a talk show host in a show called Space Ghost Coast to Coast it was a spoof on talk shows kind of a precursor to things like Zach galifianakis's Between Two Ferns or the Eric Andre show Space Ghost was depicted using animation cells from the original show combined with video of real people that he would interview Space Coast didn't really step out of

his world um into theirs and his guests were mostly transported to his show but you know he'd be like a vtuber or something if they'd done this today um interestingly they also released music by Space Ghost um which is a great band name 2007 Hatsune Miku so Miku is firstly a vocaloid software voice bank which means she's a virtual instrument that's created to simulate a human voice that anyone can buy and use for their own music The Sound was designed based on the voice of Japanese voice actor saki Fujita but she has no formal attachment or ownership of it I watched Miku performed live back in 2016 one month after we released hyper light Drifter and she gave me the first idea for ofk I saw this huge theater of people who were absolutely invested in a virtual Idol and wanted to see something with that imagination on a more intimate scale something more flawed I wanted a virtual musician who would be making music in their bedroom like a fan of Miku Miku is the most fully fictional on this list in

my opinion her voice is computer generated she's owned by a large company so it's hard to draw any direct links to humans creatively involved in her identity bless you uh this isn't inherently bad but it is tricky and I'll get to it later uh 2017 code Miko uh Miko's a vtuber twitch streamer and one of the biggest um she's voice and engineered by a real person Yuna Kang who uses a motion capture rig to stream I find this example interesting because from the beginning she has made her real self visible on streams calling herself the technician she mostly interviews other streamers sometimes plays games sometimes does Tech demos she's at the Forefront of this huge growth on Twitch of YouTubers and she has spoken about how hard the project has been on her mental health which is another thing I'll get to later you can always chat when I'm drinking water or I'll show um Beyond media examples I encourage you to think about how we all have experience constructing our identities for the consumption of others

um obviously there's an important line between yourself and a fictional character but social media does only show a sliver of your real personality and most of us give some thought to what parts of ourselves we let visible online or even what we let visible at for example this conference uh that's a stretch of the notion of ritual identity but it is connected um that's enough of me nerding out about virtual characters so let's get into me nerding out about creating virtual characters before it was set to be a virtual band ofk was simply going to be a story set in La of Indie artists trying to make something so I knew from the start that I wanted it to feel small and honest vulnerable in as a game our goal with we are ofk was to make a game experience that would welcome any fan of the music to experience the band in a deeper interactive way but in designing the characters we knew would become virtual we developed our pillars from what we wanted to avoid from references with KDA too big we didn't want to pretend we were pop stars we'd be new to

this audience and personally I'm new to singing and pop music so our characters would not be huge famous overtly glamorous like KDA gorillas too fantasy we wanted to be relatable and genuine and while it's tempting to go Supernatural with a virtual character who can be anything we wanted our characters to be human and feel honest gorillas feel honest to their creators world view but they exist in a totally different reality by nature in that they are talking gorillas uh it's got to be a reference to the monkeys um and miku's too disconnected we wanted our characters identities and backgrounds to relate to their creators not one to one no member of ofk is exactly one member of our team even my character and the stories are fictional though inspired by our lives but we wanted to be honest and that meant writing from personal experience Miku and KDA feel strategically assembled owned by a big company were small and we wanted to take advantage of that also the bigger your organization gets

the more pitfalls around representation and proper crediting before I dig into that let's step forward into how we actually made all this uh character design we wanted something that matched Jenny U's art style the art director with strong straight lines curved edges not realistic not overtly anime not cartoony we worked with our character designer in afisa tongue to develop personal styles for each character that expressed their character that came across as iconic but not so high fashion that they were Beyond relatable although they are like way stylish um then for turning them into 3D models Jenny and nafisa worked closely with our technical art director Chelsea hash for a while to create beautiful models that match style from all angles and handle lighting right um we knew we'd need beautiful models not just for the game but for hopefully the existence of the virtual characters for a long time to come so we felt the extra scrutiny was worth it mocap okay so our animators Taylor

reynards and Devon Beast uh Taylor Reynolds and Devon Beasley created all the animations for the game itself but we needed a mocap motion capture set up to operate the 3D characters for live performance we contracted a company called polywink uh they create the 52 blend shapes you need for the iPhone x facial milk app if you've used animoji you've used this system um your upload you upload your model in for like 300 per model their turnaround time is like one day and they return it to you it's incredible um so I made a clone of our main Unity project and I hacked away what I didn't need to build a Bare Bones project for Luca to stream from I used the AR kit foundations Unity plugin to connect the iPhone to AR kit and then connected it to some head ik that I'd set up so that it works with the upper body and then I just run this in tandem with a companion app on my phone which is installed by the plugin and that's it so when you see me running mocap in some examples that's

just common streaming software OBS that is screen capturing my Unity window uh I'm about to invest in a full body mocap suit for live music shows so pray for me and the tech setup for that please um so okay operating it let's dig into the weird stuff let's talk about being a virtual character um I use this mocap setup for all kinds of appearances outside the game twitch streams guest appearances and now live music about a year before release I soft launched the character um by starting similar semi-regular twitch streams I played games I sang songs or just chatted here's a quick clip hey this game is so thoughtful hey Cat yeah I pet the cat it's very relaxes me oh the cat gives me HP the cat is the save point I love it looks like it's up there in my list of favorite save points yeah this game is good though

that's eichenfell by the way shout out to Icon yeah um and that's our co-art director nafisa tongue um Beyond Live appearances pre-recording the mocap became really useful for marketing opportunities where we didn't have the budget to create new animation so for example when dreams PS4s Impe Awards asked us to judge song of the year uh I convinced them to let us say that ofk were judging the award and then Luca sent in like a greeting message for their broadcast or when we got some upsetting early feedback from the game we needed to post an important disclaimer message very quickly hi it's me Luca uh we hope you enjoyed episode one of we are ofk you two asked me to read off a few disclaimers here before we move on shoes in the house we know that there are several scenes in this series depicting us wearing shoes inside even on a bed you may wear shoes in your house we don't and again this is just a technical limitation of recreating our story in a video game

we're sorry you gotta remake the model with shoes off you can't just make a sock colored shoe it looks horrifying we I wish we tried um mocap worked well for musical performances too we did an acoustic performance of our first song Follow and follow for Day of the devs you'll notice here we did some full body animation in addition to the face mocap so for this we pre-animated the body and then I live performed the head and neck on top of Animation it was a really bizarre feeling to perform that way but I think it works so I'll play you a bit of that let it break let it man slowly give and take it a bit lonely wide awake and still standing on the verge of tears or dancing [Music] foreign [Music]

[Music] and that is our series composer Omni boy on keys um so I got a whole year of training as Luca by doing these things so by the time we release the game and the EP I was comfortable enough with running the Tech playing Luca and singing live as Luca that I could do it in higher Stakes situations here's one of my favorites this is an interview with rolling stone uh where they virtually inserted Luca into their New York Studio so he's chatting here with our

songwriters Luna shadows and Tom Powers from The Naked and Famous then please welcome our first guest the vocalist of ofk Luca Luca welcome to the stream what's that it's so great to see you thanks for having me how have you felt kind of seeing the story play out from week to week and we're coming up on the finale very shortly uh uh it's embarrassing um I I mean like there's a lot of personal stuff in there for for all of us and the the writing team did a good job of working with us to make sure that like they weren't sharing anything that was too private or that we hadn't kind of dealt with so it's a little weird do you think that this really opens the door for other artists to get their music out through a video game medium specifically and yes I would love to put all my music out through games only but you know that would mean like so I'm already old and sad I don't need to wait longer to get sadder

if you're having trouble writing your game just wait longer to get sadder uh we did more elaborate Productions too the biggest being when we announced ofk at the game awards for this we worked with an animation studio art and graft to produce ofk's first stage performance and we spent so much money on this so I'm going to make you watch some of it because it only aired once it's been a special night already and now I get to share with you another game awards first the world premiere of a new band you heard me correctly they're playing their debut single follow unfollow please welcome for the first time ever ofk [Music] this is

[Music] [Music] I'm gonna cut it before the chorus so I don't know listen to the song please I know I know um Gamers were so mad they were like oh I can't believe like you're a new band and you just get to be on the game Wards right away like like your parents probably paid Keely I'm like no I haven't been working on this for like four years and like uh yeah but we wanted to impress Keeley so we made a big fancy thing gamers um just take a moment uh recently we started doing actual live performances in the real world uh it's always been a part of my hope for the project to see our band live beyond its

video game for fans to see that like no really actually were a band outside of that game uh and you will see us on a stage so hey hire us to play your events if you run events such as this one or a party we'll play whatever I swear um okay so this is where the toxin get a little bit sad uh or at least Less Fun operating I hope it's been fun um operating like this was exhausting and Rife with some dilemmas um extra work it's a tremendous gift for me as a performer type person to creative direct this game and give live performances but it is a lot of extra jobs when I was streaming regularly to get our Twitch account up to affiliate status it meant working a whole work day and then refilling my water and sitting back down to the same desk to live stream it's fun for me but it is tiring and it's not sustainable uh it also took extra work from our team so that they could interact with the band on social media I had a lot of media training conversations with team members who were confused about how to discuss the

project publicly what was the secret and what wasn't how to talk about their work how to talk to the band on Twitter um you may have noticed a pattern with all these videos it's the Lucas show but ofk has four band members not one also Luca is the only white one and building a diverse team and story was so fundamental to how we built team ofk whom we hired who owns Revenue share full salary transparency this is so important to the politics and ethics of our team and we kind of backed ourselves into a corner my character Luca is the only member of ofk who's played by a member of the dev team the other incredible performers and if you haven't played at ofk I can't recommend it enough just for their performances alone but the other performers are professional full-time actors and in working with your actors professionally you don't ask them to work for free but we didn't have budget to go back into the video Studio every time we got a promo opportunity so Time After Time the only character we could feature for these virtual identity appearances was Luca

we could feature other characters in behind the scenes art the the nepheusa Tang our co-art director was making and we write the Twitter from the voice of itsumi but it erects a big wall when only one actual voice is being heard one exception was our feature in the PlayStation state of play for this I was able to chop up dialogue lines that we'd already recorded for the game and by recording new lines as Luca I recontextualized the other characters lines to create a new interaction between the characters which is very Frankenstein but here's a bit of it War War sucks in a world full of War where war is um just doesn't have anything to do with politics or race or imperialism out there we look to each other and to our thick arms you done and you're like how did they get them that thick is this like an alternate reality where arms are just that thick or are they robot arms our last hope

is arms Luca Focus okay okay sorry for real PlayStation promo time yep I'm just supposed to introduce our band and the game about our band right oh can we do something fun with it like can we be like why is it called state of play what are we the president the what are we we've talked about these jokes hey you hi we're still driving Jay I heard back from the mix engineer and she's cool with getting song stems on Sunday you too how's the Playstation blog post going are hashtags too much yeah I want to reach more people but I don't think I trust people who use hashtags ugh you're the best at this I'm proud of you I just do things Carter what you working on just a little audio filter I cooked up for debug here can debug make me sound like a demon okay uh give me one more run through and we'll take a proper break so it works well um it just takes a lot of extra time my

my free time and I have my limits and we also had to pull animators to work on this as well as I share all this to me it kind of sounds like I'm making excuses for failures in planning and I guess I am the degree to which we learned the degree to which we leaned into creating virtual identities grew over time and the time and budget for Via didn't I put a huge chunk of my own savings into finishing ofk and even with that as Indie Games often are at the end we were tight on uh money in hindsight I would have reserved money to pay the actors for other appearances and set aside more time for me to develop the mocap rigs for the other characters if we created more funded content uh if we created in the future I know how to plan better but we did set aside budget for marketing and we ate into that with Dev which also often happens in Indie Games we're doing live shows now and those show budgets do not pay to bring actors along yet but I hope they will because as Luca I miss my bandmates

we failed to keep the band evenly represented outside of the game in the game I'm proud of the way our team represents the characters you see on screen their backgrounds and queerness and beliefs but in Virtual identity space it's all Luca fortunately for now the game and the music have the biggest audience impact by far but for future ofk material we'll have to be more diligent um one problem I would like to think we overcame was counterbalancing the Luca dilemma with Team appearances when we first started ideating the virtual band I had this thought that we would be so secretive and pretend the band was fully real create this huge mystery but doing that meant hiding bits of the creative team's work and sure enough the very first day that we went public with we are ofk at the game awards this created interpersonal conflict I thought I'd primed team members for the plan we would acknowledge the dev team but the characters would also get some credit for work and I was wrong about this really quickly I hurt members of our team they felt hidden they felt

uncredited and in cases where they fictionally shared credit with the virtual band they still felt that loss of credit so we pivoted like very quickly um this one was fixable and since then we've tried to build a world around ofk where the virtual band co-exists with the team here's a little clip of a panel our team members uh talking with Luca for our Ludo nericon panel last year you know I'm not I'm not even interested in this my story where my friend was like Claire are you in a band like you know I'm not Innocent but I am yeah so so I was like I guess it's working you know people are that's cool good yeah are you getting what we're putting down and it's and I I feel like it's more fun this way so yeah I guess like the bonus that you

get to call your game Studio a band which is like and whenever someone like makes that joke like when's the band when's the album dropping you'll be like November uh please stream it um oh and here's our lead developer Jared Huntley talking with Luca for our Nintendo switch announcement I really like this hey everyone I'm Jared Huntley lead programmer on we are ofk and I'm Luca lafay lead singer of the band ofk we're super excited to announce that our music biopic game is coming to Nintendo switch yes oh I can play it on a tour bus ugh I can't wait to tour together we haven't seen each other since that music video brainstorm at your place in La in 2019 yeah wow wow and with the game on handheld it'll be easy to play the new episodes that are coming out every single week back to back to back can't wait to Share ofk story and music with y'all hey Jared can I get your opinion on tour outfits hey and then that guy has to go like

that or whatever the switch guy yeah um but it works and honestly it's really cute and it was fun to do it this way after that shift our character designer Naf no longer had to pretend to just be the band's stylist or fashion designer they can take credit for Designing the characters does it break the fiction I mean yeah but also no one cares no one cares I think back to that Hatsune Miku show that inspired me and I know No One Believes she's real and sure we do sometimes confuse press when we tell them that the dev team are friends with the band with like a straight face but it's the more caring approach and it's more fun for all of us so they'll figure it out um the only thing I haven't been able to do is figure out how to get me Teddy and me Luca into the room at the same time so I'm gonna do that now in a live motion capture demo at GDC running off of unity so

nobody hi Adriel great uh who hears is anyone here a game developer yeah Applause you didn't clap uh I think it's literally everyone here right by definition if you pay more than a hundred dollars to sit in a chair and listen to someone talk in San Francisco you're a developer anyway um yeah it's weird talking to you like this we haven't done a lot of live shows so usually I can't see the audience and they can't whoop oh wait oh wait did anyone here work on KDA just before I say anything okay like nothing but love for KDA but we use their name a lot for this talk title and like we didn't ask for permission or whatever um anyway yeah so I guess it's obvious I'm played by Teddy we're similar enough that we have the same opinions about big stuff similar backgrounds but different lives for sure Teddy's non-binary they came out during production of the game and that's been

interesting for the two of us to navigate I don't know if I should change to be more like Teddy I guess there wouldn't be any harm in that sometimes in interviews Teddy will use some truths from their life but not fully it's important that we respect their privacy but they have to write and perform as me live and I know that in a pinch it helps them if our lives converge a little bit it's a work in progress I don't know the events from our video game take place in the near past for me and in the distant past for Teddy we don't share any stories directly but we definitely share states of Mind struggles that we've both had I don't know if I'm comfortable being this version of myself from five years ago I'm not always proud of who I was five years ago I was sometimes oblivious to my friends I was a little dodgy flighty when you finish a project I feel like most of us want to move on like we started it with different ideals or different priorities and it feels weird to be stuck in that place it's kind of

like performing a song I wrote a while back it's an old feeling but I have to reconnect with it somehow I guess I'm proud of ofk and it's world view and its messages of Hope and minor victories in the face of existential fears and imposter syndrome and trouble communicating with people we want to love I think today Teddy is better at loving than I am but I guess I can just fast forward catch up to Teddy and see if we can move forward together okay bye bye it worked okay yeah I'll speak up thank you at smooth sailing really um they said my posture is Flawless for the camera

um okay so the future and dangers I've touched on the difficulties and dilemmas we faced with ofk's virtual identities but I want to revisit those as a focal point here because these days when it comes to technology parasocial relationships AI game companies especially especially for profit ones especially publicly traded companies they are by and large a lot more about what they can do with technology than what is right to do what is healthy what is caring scale as a team grows how you coalesce the values of that team into a single voice is hard you could argue we already do that in games but it is more pointed with virtual identities you can't ask a game a question and get an answer usually a game can't make an appearance at a fundraiser a game can't get in an argument Brands brands are not identities the Wendy's Twitter account is not a person a games publisher Twitter it's not a person uh hell most game studios accounts are not a person and neither is ofk you have to keep that in mind virtual identities are the most

unforgiving sieve of whether a group of people are aligned in their ideologies because you have one voice speaking for everyone often live under pressure let's talk about parasocial relationships if you're not familiar with this term it refers to the one-sided relationships that develop between fans and the artists they follow it's a very common practice among social media influencers today to encourage parasocial Relationships by which the influencer will ask questions to Their audience or encourage participation or affiliation through a Discord you know like they'll they'll post a photo and be like out here eating chips like what's your favorite flavor of chips let me know in the comments and then you know comments and many fans come to feel that they have a closer relationship with their Idol than they do when you operate a virtual character this gets extra complicated how to be genuine when you're not wholly real when I play Luca I do try to invent fiction on the fly to preserve my own privacy I'll make up details about Luca

hanging out with other members of the band earlier that day maybe eating chips um sometimes it's a great word sometimes I of baseless reality is on my own reality but only Loosely just to help me keep facts straight when I'm trying to make this stuff up live what I refuse to be dishonest about is emotion getting on a twitch stream and telling the chat that I'm feeling depressed when I'm not is asking for emotional labor for a fictional construct and to me that crosses an ethical line that I've drawn on the flip side if I am feeling sad or anxious I will share that with the audience because it helps me feel that I'm speaking from the heart plus they know that somewhere on the other side of Luca is a person and if they do any homework they know it's me so in our case I feel like it's okay to share it to a certain degree what I'm saying is that the dangers of parasocial relationships of manipulating people's emotions and emotional investment in order to get them to buy a product is not okay and you do have to be supremely careful when you're operating a virtual identity

forget I have glasses representation um I'm ending on this one because it's the most important arguably ofk is even a half measure because I'm a white person up here with an undue amount of visibility from the rest of our team ofk team friends if there's any ofk can you stand up is anyone in the crowd um is Adriel still here shout out to Adriel um if you have questions after the talk please ask me but you're also welcome to talk to the team too because you've just heard a lot of what I have to say already um the games industry is paying better attention to the Equitable representation of diverse stories and perspectives on screen gradually we're also seeing more diverse hiring gradually with Studios being more careful to pay people whose stories they're telling we are still failing miserably at the balance of power and most game studios that push their bypoc or queer employees to the front of the team photo those photos are not the highest those employees are not the highest paid or the most senior and it's crucial to be asking more directly who profits from the success of

a game Who profits diversity funds at consoles and Publishers have to go Beyond seeing a PowerPoint slide with diverse faces on it before they're giving money and actually ask who owns Revenue share who is empowered to make choices we had a number of discussions about diversity funding with outside Partners who didn't ask for any of that and we were like please like take our receipts um so should you create a virtual identity in the interest of giving you um the most information and in the interest of you giving my talk a good review uh here's the slide with some pros and cons so fill out your survey at the end of the talk please they they tell me you got to say that it's part of the cons um you have to invent new story on the fly but honestly I don't know if fans will hold you too closely to it and I got pretty good at dodging details during live streams by just like being charming and like thing um winking if you gotta make sure your mocap can wink um by the time my co-writer Claire Gia and I finished all the scripts I had a

pretty strong grasp of Luca's daily life and mannerisms so this Gotti is here um there can be big representation issues if one virtual character is repping the whole team but that happens already I guess like every GDC talk this week will be people representing their whole teams um but with ritual identity the difficulty gets higher operating a virtual identity is essentially running a live service game right except the live content is your social media and more content that you produce I guess you could make your social media manager the virtual character if you have one and can afford like have that role but that's not always the skill set or the project ownership of a social media manager inherently acting writing a new story on the fly it creates a strange new pressure on your social media presence to stay active even after release because if you're not keeping it up after the game releases are your characters dead like kda's last tweet is from 2021 is KDA dead this tweet is just an emoji like anyone could have tweeted that I don't know if that's Ari from KDA and Alvin and the Chipmunks last tweet is

from 2020 have they finally followed their creator to the Grave look at all these hashtags like this is a cry for help like some find them fine I'll miss Simon and Theodore especially Theodore um Pros you get direct engagement uh as game devs we rarely get to engage directly with our fans so this is pretty great at least for me an extrovert time to talk with fans and hear what they want to say to your characters is really special promotion I've shared a lot of fun examples of what we got to do it opens up a lot of creative avenues for spreading the word during an era where promoting your game is a thankless endless Grim social media landscape and Tick Tock is already tipping down on how it treats its users attention um but it also helps you pitch stuff right we got Rolling Stone we got to be on Rolling Stone because I was like yo we can do this virtual thing and they're like well that's so cool and it is so cool social values um if you can navigate a lot of the social and team Dynamic pitfalls of running a virtual character it's a great pointed vehicle for

communicating your team's values to the world a way for your team to speak to more current events that may not be touched on in your game's story virtual characters getting political is maybe a scary Prospect to you but games not being political is a more dangerous reality um stand for something you can't have a virtual identity without an identity ah so that's Luca and me uh I have failed in a lot of ways building and running this character most pointedly failing to get the other characters live the way Luca is but I've been up here to hopefully share that in an honest way so I'll leave you with this if you're going to create a virtual character find your way to be honest be genuine be authentic through fiction the same really goes for any game you make please stand for something thanks

remember people used to do this when people were clapping for that I just I just had where did this go uh there's microphones I can't see anything but uh oh thanks that's does anyone have questions or chat like want to challenge me to a game of Yu-Gi-Oh oh can you go is it cool if you go to the mic I'll repeat the question anyway but just so everyone can hear I can't believe the millcap works it's way too high oh no I will just talk like this okay is a coincidence purely I'm wearing a Hatsune Miku jacket what I know right it's crazy it's crazy but anyway um it's happened a lot with uh mostly YouTubers where sometimes uh they're under contract and they their personality can sometimes blur a bit too far and then if they get replaced or they graduate so to say then that

character ceases to exist if there was an instant uh I would say Luca for this example where something happened where you could not perform the character anymore what would be the plan for the band or would you replace it with a different person to play them or is it too intrinsically tied and the band would cease like what would happen in the replacement yeah that's interesting this I was I was just looking at the seraphine Twitter this morning seraphims yeah exactly yeah seraphine was Riot's follow-up to Katya and she's like an indie singer songwriter and she had a lot of she got a lot of criticism for being uh manipulative with parasocial relationships because she was like I'm feeling depressed um I was looking at her Twitter because like her last tweet was just like I need to spend more time offline and everyone was like good luck seraphine um yeah yeah like also there was a gorillas live stream recently and I I learned I didn't know this that the characters are now played by voice actors or at least some of them are um because like I think I think Jamie

Hewlett the artist didn't want to play his character anymore he's just tired of doing it and I think that's fine I think replacing is interesting I think if like we like if I just get tired of carrying it or we do we have no money or whatever I just again I think like you just have to be careful to be honest you have to accept that people know it's fake and don't be like I'm Ill and then like like kill your like I just don't think that's I that's a good I like the honest being able to like say if you do move on being honest also about like that degree of separation because again YouTubers tend to use the terms of graduation and just straight up banishing and then they can't take their identities with them because of the corporate angle so then it looks like they just vanished entirely so yeah sorry the question for camera was like what to do if you're stopping operating a virtual character um yeah I actually the last thing I'll say is like I touched on this a little bit but just accepting that like you're

not fooling anybody is really important I think for a lot of YouTubers that separation they feel like a protection that they have their YouTuber as a separate person so they really want to believe that that wall is strong and impenetrable but people know that there's a human being right so like um again it's just it's one of those moments of like being careful about what the okay thank you very much thank you thank you yeah uh hey great session by the way thank you um what do you what would you say is the biggest difference between you and Luca and why did you created that difference oh um so the question is what's the biggest difference between me and Luca and why did we create that difference he also said great session it was it was right write your feedback take your reviews this is the same thing I do on Twitter streams which is I'm stalling well I think about the question um I mean that's so for one like it's not

like I started from me um like Claire and I wrote the characters from the point of view of just writing any other characters but I did have an idea that it was gonna be a self-insert so actually like there were elements of for example during the character design process where Naf was pitching ideas and I was like oh I don't think I can make my voice embody a certain design I was like we need to kind of like I I admittedly I pulled the visual design closer to myself um something that uh I know that at least I did in an exercise for all the characters was to take um some I learned this from like a writer who I really admire it was like take something from yourself that you are the most critical of or ashamed of in your past or present and put that in a character and it's a helpful but you know risky way of being mean to your character it can be hard When developing a character to give them like real flaws that are um really unforgivable so Luca has some of that like his his plotline has to do with

like being indecisive and being flaky and these are things that like I felt like I had let people down in uh in my life but beyond that like it's not exactly a process of like starting from me and moving backwards it was a little bit more of like what you concede into any character so I think in that way um it was just like building any other character except occasionally I have to be like oh I wanted to sound like me and like I want to be able to be kind of like obnoxious and overly chatty because I'm of those things um at my worst or whatever does that answer the question uh yeah I think it's cool thanks hello cool hi thank you so much for your talk um so uh confession I'm a YouTuber uh I started being a YouTuber before I became a game developer and then I became a game developer in software um but because I was an independent YouTuber before uh developing software a lot of my own personal identity has kind of become wrapped up in kind of my own brand because that's something that I managed for myself

um so as I continue to kind of navigate the game developer World um trying to figure out where that brand kind of like intersects with like my game developer Persona and like how um to to kind of manifest that and kind of like public experience public appearances especially as somebody who is like trans and non-binary and trying my best to like be visible to like the world and whatever um so I was wondering like if you have any insights on what happens when the virtual identity so closely overlaps with your own personal identity and kind of like navigating that space uh some thank you for that question um now I'm all nervous because you're like you know what you know how this goes probably better than I do um the question is and I forgive me for a bad recap but like um what to do when your own personal brand or identity is getting closer to the characters and how to deal with that in terms of engaging with the community

um I guess like my specific experience is that um once again it's for me it was one of those things of like I don't think people care as much as I felt like they did was like oh how do I behave on my personal Twitter versus when I'm in control of the ofk Twitter or if Lucas Twitter like how do I you know make sure those are separate things like there's there's for me at least there's less overlap there's a lot less overlap with like who's following me as Teddy the game developer or whatever and who's following the band um and even when I stopped being less secret or when I started being less secretive about it being like okay like I'll talk about Teddy's existence still it's not like I saw some like I wasn't like pouring followers from ofk into Teddy like uh an interesting example of this is that um uh some like musician friends of mine who are in like uh really big bands like Coachella bands like nobody follows them and nobody cares like even if I mean people care but like they're there to follow the project or the specific thing and so it's it's it's already hard

enough if you want to to get people to cross over so again just in my experience like it's okay if they get closer and I worry less about like oh I have to be super different in both because like no one's really watching as closely as I fear that they are and certainly not like a critical way I mean people are always critical on the internet but that's that's my anecdotal experience thank you thank you we got three more minutes we got time hi yeah hello best GDC talk ever by the way thank you all speak up um how did your relationship to making we are ofk change by having a character that represented so much of yourself and your own issues in the game um good question what's funny for me uh the question is how did my relationship with making we are AFK change when there's a character who has so much of me in it sort of also they say best talk ever for camera best talk ever um I'll maybe stop doing that yeah

um so I guess like as I was saying to an earlier question like for me actually what's funny is I think the the stuff that that I put into the characters that I am the most like um have struggled with or feel the most ashamed of in my life is actually not in Luca Luca's stuff is a little bit more like obvious Lucas flaws are very obvious from the front uh and he gets like vocal criticism from his friends so he's actually kind of the easy one um whereas like the the other characters have some like deeper again like no one-to-one I'm not you know like using real life stories but um I don't know if that was intentional but it definitely is a convenience that his is a little bit like right in your face and it's not as like for me like painful in the way some of the other stuff is thank you thank you hi hello okay um I was just wondering if there's ever times where you're you're belie or like Lucas of beliefs kind of push you towards like compromising your own beliefs and if that were to ever happen would how would you kind of navigate

that like would you rein him in more or would you let him kind of let loose in in a way compromise your own like your own self yeah the the um the question is like what do I do if Lucas beliefs separate from my beliefs um how do I handle that um I mean like his beliefs are not going to diverge from mine on like important social or political issues right um and maybe that is a luxury another luxury and privilege for me as the person operating him that our team is pretty aligned in political abilities or very aligned I would hope but even so it's not like I'm checking with the team anytime he makes a political comment or something um that being said like the one thing I can think of which is maybe not a belief but like a a preference is like Luca is a little bit more um hyper confident than I am or at least projects hyper-confidence um can be dismissive of criticism uh can just gloat or not gloat but like boast more um and I as I as I age I'm like trying

to be quieter as a person um quieter quieter as a leader softer touch in terms of trying to care for people and Lucas like still kind of barreling through um writing writing privilege and just having a grand old time so that's a little awkward for me like on live streams to do but but it's it's usually in a pretty safe environment it's not like he's like making fun of people in the chat he's not directing that towards real people um so that's that's about the most tension I felt so far I think thank you thank you we got time for two more if we'll go here and then one at the mic and then we'll talk to you afterwards for anything else hi yeah um if we could actually take this to a wrap-up room it'll be in room 2014 and 2018 down the hall thank you cool thanks everybody [Applause]

[Music] thank you